Faculty

Assistant Professor Sarah Teasley joins the department from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In 2006-07, she presented her work on gender and class issues in modern Japanese design and architecture in cities including London, Helsinki, Montreal, Chicago, New York and Cambridge. Her paper at the CAA annual meeting, part of a panel on beauty and femininity in East Asian art, analyzed  ideas of beauty in architectural writings for male and female audiences in late nineteenth century Japan. Other papers discussed representations of urban space in Japanese cinema, and the impact of the American occupation of Japan (1945-52) on material culture and architecture in both countries. In March, she co-authored the final report of an 18-month study on Japanese houses built in the United States c. 1900, funded by a grant from the Housing Research Foundation, a Tokyo-based funding agency. She is Vice-President of the Design Studies Forum, a CAA-affiliated society, and serves on the executive committee of the Design History Workshop Japan. She spent the summer completing her Ph.D. dissertation, “The Formation of Mokuzai Kogei: Social Networks and the Ideology of Design Research in Modern Japan”, at the University of Tokyo , and will conduct research in Japan in fall 2007, before arriving in Evanston in January 2008.